The blackness crunched all memory of the sun—
have the hard ring, the thick-packed consonantal beauty of stirring Greek.
Dauber will have value to American poetry-readers if only from its mere power of revealing that poetry is not alone the mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells, though it be that also, but may have music of innumerable kinds.
Biography, the next poem in the book, sings with a different voice and sees from a different point of view, the difficulty of re-creating in expression—here expression through words, not through colors—
This many-pictured world of many passions.
Biography, too, rises from the invisible root of friendship and bears with wonderfully vivid arborescence an appreciative tale of the fine contribution of different companionships to a life.
Among the two-score shorter lyrics of the collection are songs of the sea or of the country-side; chants of coast-town bells and ports, marine ballads, and love-poems. This is, however, the loosest entitling of their kinds; nothing but the work itself in its entirety, can ever tell the actual subject of any true poem. Of these kinds it is not to the marine ballads that one turns back again and again, not to the story of "Spanish Waters" nor to any of the jingling-gold, the clinking-glass, the treasure-wreck verses of the book. Their tunes are spirited, but not a tenth as spirited as those of "The Pirates of Penzance." Indeed, to the conventionally villainous among fictive sea-faring persons of song, Gilbert and Sullivan seem to have done something that cannot now ever be undone.
The poems in the volume one does turn back to again and again are those with the great singing tones, that pour forth with originality, with inexpressible free grace and native power. Again and again you will read A Creed, C. L. M., Born for Nought Else, Roadways, Truth, The Wild Duck, Her Heart, and—